Dibujo de un zorro herido / Dibuix d’una guineu ferida

About the show

Dibujo de un zorro herido / Dibuix d’una guineu ferida begins with Ferran, an early years teacher, who comes across the self-portrait of a painter his own age in an art gallery. The painting was created four years earlier, and the artist—Daniel Gómez Mengual—died a year later in a car accident. On his way home, Ferran finds the self-portrait on Instagram and begins to lose himself in the velvety photos of the painter’s life. A life that ended abruptly. The obsession begins. Videos of Christmas parties and piano ballads blend with footage of car crash tests: airbags exploding, dummies flying through the air, shattering glass. Daniel’s body after the accident becomes a question mark that haunts Ferran, day and night. What did he look like after the crash? What parts changed? Questions that draw him closer to a body that is not the painter’s, but his own. Identity, trauma and desire, painted in oil.

Notes from the playwright and director

At the first meeting of the Dramatic Residencies programme, what guided me was more a feeling than a concrete idea. I knew the piece I was going to build would have tones of nostalgia and loneliness. The slowed-down, reverb-heavy song covers on TikTok led us—my fellow residents, the Dramático team and I—to reflect on the idea of playing with time: stretching it, compressing it. The concept of “dreamlike states” came up more than once. It wasn’t until Patricia Highsmith entered the creative constellation I was orbiting that all this material began to take on dramatic shape. Her Tom Ripley became the spine of my Ferran—and her Dickie Greenleaf, my Daniel. The arrival of the doppelgänger in my creative space opened up questions about identity and desire. The differences between the two protagonists became a space in which to explore what makes a person— —what shapes the way they see the world, and how they see themselves. Vast questions, which I poured into a school setting, placing childhood at the centre of the board. From this intuitive collage emerges Dibujo de un zorro herido / Dibuix d’una guineu ferida—a story about someone who, by pretending to be someone else, inhabits themselves for the first time. A lucid dream about desiring and being desired. A tender and violent exploration of the act of looking.

Oriol Puig Grau